Noncompositional

Anyone who’s spent any time reading the blog (or the scholarly work) of Neal Whitman knows that English has a whole bunch of messed up coordinate structures. My personal favorite is friends in low places, aka Right-node wrapping. But also up there is the combination of quotative inversion and coordination. For instance:

“No problem,” said the stewardess and promptly dropped a second tray of food onto my foldout table, without taking away the original one. link

The interesting thing being that the stewardess, who is the one doing the saying, after the verb due to a particular narrative convention, but nonetheless acts as the subject of the sentence with respect to the coordination: the stewardess is also the one who dropped the second tray of food.

If you’ve been thinking about the title of this post, you’ll probably see what I’m getting at. The same sort of issue arises with so-called locative inversion, as in:

down came the rain and washed the spider out

out came the sun and dried up all the rain

I have to admit that I find quotative inversion plus coordination to sound strange, and outside of this particular nursery rhyme, I think I’d find locative inversion equally jarring. But there it is.

Just a few random thoughts as I was reading over something I wrote.

Out of context, something like “he’s a speaker” makes no sense, or at least requires a bunch more imagination to make sense of it. Could be that “speaker” is a title (like, “of the house”), but barring that, it’s really quite different from something like “he’s a swimmer.” Probably because we usually expect people to speak, but not necessarily to swim (but again, that can’t be quite right, because we usually expect people to be able to run, but “she’s a runner” is fine as a way to introduce someone, but “she’s a walker” is not. Maybe because “he’s a swimmer” (and “she’s a runner”) usually means that s/he swims/runs professionally, or at least competitively. Can you say “he’s a speaker” to mean his profession is giving speeches and lectures? Seems odd at best If you add an informative adjective like “traveling” or “political” maybe it improves).

But then consider what happens with certain adjectives:

She’s a good speaker.

Here, she’s probably an orator or speech-giver. Plausible as part of an introductory description of someone. (”You should meet Sue. She’s a great speaker.” But strange: “…She’s a speaker.”)

She’s a native speaker.

This is interesting, because this requires a context where the addressee can figure out what language “she” is a native speaker of. In fact, in this usage, speaker has an optional PP-of complement (”she is a native speaker of Japanese”). Not so for “she’s a good speaker”. We don’t say (usually) that someone is “a good speaker of lectures/speeches/addresses/…”.

I don’t often shop at Sears - in fact, as far as I can remember I’ve walked into one less than five times in my life. But recently I was looking for an item that I thought might be sold at Sears (turned out, it’s not, at least not at the one I went to), and we now live not far from one, so I went over to do some shopping. While up in the tools and hardware section, I heard a really interesting message over the PA system. Paraphrasing:

Attention, Sears sales associates. Make sure your areas are well organized. Walk through the aisles and make sure your inventory is tidy and that everything is visible. Remember, we pride ourselves on good service, and always put the customer first!

I’d never heard anything like this before. For the first half of the announcement, I was thinking, “why am I hearing this?” Then it became clear - this public announcement, on the surface aimed at employees (I have no idea if what was in the message was actually supposed to be immediately relevant to sales associates), was designed to be overheard by customers.

It’s an interesting question how (or if) one can tell that a message that was not explicitly addressed to them is meant to be overheard by them. It seems as though the biggest cues are semantic and pragmatic, but it seems like there could be some more grammatically constructions that do the job. I’m thinking of utterances like Well, I would have gone to the show but _someone_ wanted to stay home and unpack all evening. It seems as though conversation analysts would have covered this topic in their work, but after a quick search the closest thing I could find was the idea that conversations in play-by-play sports commentary are dialogues meant to be heard by a non-participating audience. Then there’s the more recent idea that some instances of self-directed or soliloquial utterances are in fact meant to be overheard by nearby potential addressees. But I don’t know of any real generalizations that have been made about saying things with the intention that someone other than the addressee receives a message.